The writer was the most vital poets of the Enlightenment. With his plays and his theoretical writings he influenced the further development of German literature significantly. By Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the name of a newer in the German drama and theater arts is connected. He went not only the action of the tragedy in bourgeois circles, but also its content. Moreover, Lessing is a well-known writer of fables, epigrams, and author of literary criticism and theoretical writings. His reputation as one of the foremost scouts, he will meet publicly as a writer of pamphlets. Became well-known for his feud with the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze …
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on 22 January 1729 Kamenz born in High Lusatia.
His father was a pastor Johann Gottfried Lessing wrote primarius at the city’s main church, and church writings. His mother, Salome, Justine, was born Feller, the daughter of her husband’s predecessor. Early on, Lessing was prepared by his ambitious father by giving private lessons to school and study. From 1737 to 1741 he was then the student Kamenzer Latin School. He attended school until 1746, the Duke of St. Afra in Meissen. From this period are the first literary beginnings. Due to its excellent performance, he could end school early in 1746, the Meissen elite. Be completed during this period excepted comedy “The Young Scholar” was performed in 1748 with much success by the Neuberischen theater group.
With leaving school he started studying theology at the University of Leipzig. But his preference was for the theater. From this period come the first published poems in the magazine “naturalist” and the “encouragement to the pleasures of the mind” which was published by Christlob Mylius, a relative. Lessing was introduced by his father called home because he was worried to neglect his studies. In 1748 he started to study medicine. In the same year he rushed to Berlin to go to his creditors out of their way. There he worked as a freelance writer – probably the first really professional. He worked together with Mylius as editor of the journal “Donations to the history and record of the theater,” he continued as a “Over-the-top Library” in 1754 alone.
Besides translations, reviews of scientific and literary works and poems he made in this time in Berlin, the two type comedies, “The Free Thinker” and “The Jews” (1749). Especially as a reviewer he made his name by the enemies he included in the debate and argued with. From the year 1751 he was editor of the “Berlin Priveligirten newspaper.” The following year he completed his studies at Wittenberg as a master of philosophy. Already in November 1752 he was back in Berlin, translated writings of Voltaire and Frederick II and continued his “Over-the-top Library” in no particular order. This proved to be an ambitious machinate which should see the critical universal history of the theater. It remained unfinished. In the years 1553-1755 his collected works were published in the six-part series “Scripture”.
In 1754 he studied in Berlin, Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai know. In the jump of 1755 was the bourgeois tragedy “Miss Sara Sampson”. It set new standards in Germany over the prescribed limit of Christoph Gottsched genus by the tragedy plays in the bourgeois milieu. You will no longer constitute public high matters of state from aristocratic circles, but the personal problems of individuals. That was the unheard of, the abandonment of French classicism, headed for the national-bourgeois theater. Lessing had so much success in the theater audience. He developed in correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai, a theory about the moral effect of passionate excitement. For Lessing, came the tragedy of the gathering to arouse pity. And it was a compassionate man capable of the best of all “social virtues” are united.
Even in comedy, he took the approach to the civil dimension as the example of “Minna, Minna, or the soldiers of fortune” (1767) shows. He opposed the derision in Gottsched `shear manner. In Dignified 1756, the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, a multi-year learning journey of a rich merchant, Christian Gottfried Winkler stopped by throughout Europe, was to accompany him to Lessing. He went back to Leipzig and made friends with the Prussian major, and poet Ewald von Kleist. In May 1758, Lessing went back to Berlin, where he worked on his “Letters on the Recent Literature” – collaborated (1759 1765). The much much-admired work has been published by Friedrich Nicolai. Complete surprise to his friends in Berlin in 1760 he took a post as regimental secretary of the Prussian General Tauentzien in Wroclaw.
Shortly before the tragedy was “Philotas” (1759), in which Lessing aburteilt the inhumanity of war and blind intrepidness. The period lasted until 1765 in Breslau, in which he had in his permanent job and no money worries indulge his passion for gambling could. He had enough time to write yet. Thus arose environmental studies for “Minna, Minna, or the soldiers of fortune” in which his experiences with the military environment and the Prussian police came to represent so real that the censorship go. Lessing returned to Berlin and resumed his literary work again. 1766 appeared the aesthetic treatise “Loakoon: or the limits of Mahlerey and poetry,” a more extensive work that has been taken above all by younger people excited. His plans, librarian at the Royal Library in Berlin to be fulfilled, not themselves.
Lessing was dedicated to the employees hired as a consultant and dramaturge at the newly founded National Theatre in Hamburg. But even less than a year later, in 1769, the ambitious machinate had to be stopped due to lack of audience interest. Lessing took place in September as a librarian at the well-known ducal library at Wolfenbüttel. In the early years of this Wolfenbütteler time he was a writer small work. 1771 appeared the tragedy “Emilia Galotti,” Lessing criticizes the abuse of royal power and bourgeois impotence. From 1774 to 1778 he published a radical deist bible and critical documents from the estate of Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These editors work he negotiated a above all major criticism of the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze.
There followed an total dispute correspondence between Lessing and Goeze. The reason-based defenses of the librarian, such as “On the evidence of the Spirit and of power (1777) or” Anti-Goeze 1 -. 11 “(1778) show a high degree of voice clarity, expressiveness, and polemics you mission all the enlightened sense that even the religious conviction of the criteria of reason have to undergo. On a trip to Vienna and Italy, he accompanied from 1775 to 1776 the Prince Leopold of Brunswick. With his return he married a Hamburg merchant widow, Eva King, with whom he was engaged for 1771st But she died in 1777 with the birth of their son, who died as well. The Quotes to arrive at the Mannheim National Theatre, Lessing declined, the terrible experiences in Hamburg were still not forgotten.
In his last years in Wolfenbüttel he turned to theological questions. In view of the fact that the dispute was finished with Pastor Goeze from above, the dispute continued Lessing continues at another level. In this way, his only verse drama “Nathan the Wise” (1799) is shown. Through the moral and historical-philosophical piece of blank verse was a classic German Dramenvers to significant advantage. In the “Nathan” Lessing calls for tolerance and humanity. 1780 appeared the theological-historical-philosophical treatise “The education of the human race.” It is a thematic continuation of “Nathan” to consider. Also in the field of the epigram, and especially the fabulous Art Lessing worked in a significant way. He always tried to reproduce their first sharpness of the allegory in the sense of Aesop.
In addition to Lessing plays and other pieces made numerous literary criticism and genre theory, works such as “17 Literature Epistle” (1759), the “correspondence about the tragedy” (1756 – 1757) and the posthumously published “Hamburg Dramaturgy”.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died on 15 February 1781 in Braunschweig.
